Perhaps this will help refresh the collective memories of the American public about WHY we put restrictions on the CIA back in the 1970s. The agency was spying on ordinary Americans, conducting illegal activities, infiltrating anti-war organizations, was paranoid, incompetent, had an inflated sense of self importance…Does this sound familiar to anyone?

CIA details ‘family jewels’

Long-secret documents released yesterday provide new details about how the CIA illegally spied on Americans decades ago, including trying to bug a Las Vegas hotel room for evidence of infidelity and tracking down an expert lock picker for a Watergate conspirator.
Known inside the agency as the “family jewels,” the 702 pages of documents released yesterday catalog domestic wiretapping operations, failed assassination plots, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists from the early years of the CIA.

The papers provide evidence of paranoia and occasional incompetence as the agency began a string of illegal spying operations in the 1960s and 1970s, often to hunt links between communist governments and the domestic protests that roiled the nation during that period.

Yet the long-awaited documents leave out a great deal. Large sections are censored, showing that the CIA still cannot bring itself to expose all the skeletons in its closet. And many activities about overseas operations disclosed years ago by journalists, congressional investigators and a presidential commission are not detailed in the papers.

The broad outlines of the CIA’s illegal activities have been known for some time. Still, the public has never seen most of the documents, contemporary memorandums and reports from an agency that zealously guards its files and almost never permits outsiders to examine its internal records.
More than anything, the papers provide a dark history of the climate both at the CIA and in Washington during the Cold War and the Vietnam era, when fears about the Soviet threat created a no-holds-barred culture at the spy agency.

Last year George W. Bush said that the US was winning the war in Iraq and the war on terror. I was dumfounded then and even more confused now as we seem to be losing more and more “wars.” In fact, the Bush administration doesn’t seem to be winning any war. Seven years of “leadership” and this is what the administration has to show for it:

War on Drugs

Afghanistan opium production soars

Afghanistan’s poppy crop this year could yield even more opium than last year’s record harvest because of favourable weather conditions, a United Nations official said Monday. Afghanistan’s opium crop grew 59 per cent in 2006 to 165,000 hectares, yielding a record crop of more than 5,500 tonnes, enough to make more than 550 tonnes of heroin — 90 per cent of the world’s supply, according to the UN.

The war on Poverty

Home starts in the U.S. fell for the first time in four months in May as interest rates rose, suggesting the worst housing recession in 16 years will persist.

…The slump, which has lasted almost two years, is restraining economic growth even as inflation is too high for the comfort of Federal Reserve officials. Meanwhile, the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage has jumped to the highest in more than a year, putting pressure on first-time buyers and raising the prospect of additional defaults.

Foreclosures soar in South Florida, hurting minorities

Foreclosure rates are rising quickly in South Florida, and borrowers in low-income, minority neighborhoods have been hit the hardest.

First-quarter growth weakest in 4 years

The economy grew at a 0.7 percent annual pace in the first three months of this year, the weakest in more than four years as businesses sold off inventories but consumer spending remained strong, a Commerce Department report on Thursday showed. It was the weakest quarterly expansion in gross domestic product, or GDP, since the fourth quarter of 2002 but slightly better than the government’s earlier 0.6 percent estimate for growth during the quarter. Still, it was a tad weaker than the 0.8 percent growth economists were expecting.

The fight for healthcare

‘Not Getting Better’

A new study finds serious lung problems among thousands of 9/11 responders.
Researchers found that in the year after the attacks, the firefighters who’d spent time at Ground Zero suffered a decrease in lung function capability equal to 12 years of age-related decline.

Soldiers Share Troubling Stories Of Military Health Care Across U.S.

Ray Oliva went into the spare bedroom in his home in Kelseyville, Calif., to wrestle with his feelings. He didn’t know a single soldier at Walter Reed, but he felt he knew them all. He worried about the wounded who were entering the world of military health care, which he knew all too well. His own VA hospital in Livermore was a mess. The gown he wore was torn. The wheelchairs were old and broken.

It is just not Walter Reed. The VA hospitals are not good either except for the staff who work so hard. It brings tears to my eyes when I see my brothers and sisters having to deal with these conditions. I am 70 years old, some say older than dirt but when I am with my brothers and sisters we become one and are made whole again.”

The Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) today released initial results from a nationwide study of 1,237

U.S. healthcare facilities, examining the prevalence of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a virulent multi-drug resistant organism. Findings demonstrate MRSA prevalence rates to be at least 46 cases per 1,000 patients — significantly more widespread and established than previous estimated rates.

Education

More bad news for U.S. education

Despite spending more per student per year on education than any other country but Switzerland, the U.S. (at $11,152 per student vs. Switzerland’s $11,334) is losing ground: it ranks seventh (tied with Belgium) among industrialized nations in the percentage of people aged 25 to 34 who hold a college degree. Twenty years ago, the U.S. ranked first.

Creationism, With New Name, Is Taught in Schools

The debate over the teaching of creationism in public schools is raging across the country, but proponents of creationism have given it a new name — intelligent design.

According to the News Tribune, many teachers of intelligent design deny that they are teaching creationism but say that they believe students should be exposed to ideas other than evolution that explain human existence. Intelligent design postulates that life is not the consequence of events as explained by Darwin, but that it is the work of an intelligent designer.

The result (click on the image to watch the film):

The War against Terrorism

Iraq policy is failing, says top senator

The top-ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called Monday for a drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq, breaking with the Bush administration and signaling a further weakening of congressional support for the president’s Iraq strategy.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), who chaired the committee until Democrats took control this year, said the White House’s continuing commitment to its troop “surge” is hurting U.S. leverage with other countries, strengthening America’s enemies, stressing the military and compounding the chances of a chaotic retreat from Iraq down the road.

“Our course in Iraq has lost contact with our vital national security interests in the Middle East and beyond,” Lugar said in a speech delivered on the Senate floor on short notice Monday evening. “We risk foreign policy failures that could greatly diminish our influence in the region and the world.”

36 Ways the US Is Losing the War on Terror

Three years and half a trillion dollars later America is losing the war on terrorism. The 9/11 Commission has warned that more and worse acts of terrorism are to be expected. Bin Laden’s planning always assumed that we, in reacting to him, would help him carry out his objectives. Well, we did. In his dreams he could not have imagined the damage done to America. So how are we losing the war?

On the plus side:

The battle against the bong

Monday’s 5 to 4 ruling is the latest to limit the right of students to speak freely since the Court proclaimed in 1969 that they do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech … at the schoolhouse gate.” The court says schools may punish “student speech celebrating drug use” without violating the Constitution, just as they can prohibit “lewd or vulgar” language or speech “sponsored” by the school in, for example, a student newspaper, two First Amendment exceptions that the justices created with rulings in the late 1980s.

Writing for the court, Roberts stresses that “drug abuse can cause severe and permanent damage to the health and well-being of young people” and so “deterring drug use by school children” is justification enough for silencing a student. But as even the chief acknowledges, it is far from clear whether Bong Hits 4 Jesus is a pro-drug message or just a bunch of nonsense, an ambiguity that puts the court’s reasoning on shaky ground.

Tracking activity within the US

A secret court approved all but one of the government’s requests last year to search or eavesdrop on suspected terrorists and spies, according to Justice Department data released Tuesday.

In all, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court signed off on 2,176 warrants targeting people in the United States believed to be linked to international terror organizations or spies. The record number is more than twice as many as were issued in 2000, the last full year before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

On the plus side for Americans, Congress seems to be growing weary of the administration’s policy of secretly stealing, spying and creating a dictatorship that the president said he wished for (First time and the second time).

You don’t see too many defending the U.S. anymore!

Lay off America - its heart is in the right place

It’s an easy target, but it’s time to stop mocking the States. They could sure teach the Brits a thing or two

The Observer (UK)

Once again, this time for a report commissioned by the broadcaster itself, the ostensibly neutral BBC stands accused of a sneaky preference for dressing to the left. Much of the evidence for this is, at best, wobbly, but one witness employee, Washington correspondent Justin Webb, needs to be heard. The organisation, he peeved, is anti-American; it treats the US with scorn and derision and accords it ‘no moral weight’.
He is, thus far at least, correct. The last 10 years have seen American stories relegated to a slew of ‘and finally’ freak shows, a vast country’s talents reduced to synchronised gas-guzzling as choreographed by Paris Hilton. The trouble is that it is not just the BBC; disdaining Americans has become a national sport, regardless of the fact that it requires the skill of all sports involving fish, guns and barrels.

Everybody knows the check-list, only their priorities vary: stem cells, lethal injections, indelicate warfare, creationism, the second amendment, Wal-Mart, reproductive choice, pointy white hoods, chewing tobacco and obscene chocolate. We may add personal quibbles: that they call this paper The London Observer, on the solipsistic basis that if all their newspapers are mono-citied, then so must be everyone’s. Or that now they finally screen Formula One, they go to ad breaks during clusters of pitstops because, apparently, stationary cars are boring. Jeez.
And yet, still, the view looks different from here. Here, in the house we bought a decade ago, a purchase then widely envied but news of which is now greeted in Britain with rudely choleric disbelief, especially given that we are in Georgia, not even the settlements of Tina Brown!, I heard Justin Webb’s lone but plaintive cry and felt a comradely sadness.

The international shimmy from anti-Bush sentiments to blanket anti-American sentiments has been widely noted, especially since the President was elected a second time and so, say critics, the refusal of the nation to bow to experience means not just they have only themselves to blame but that we, by extension, may play the blame game too. Whatever the logic of that, however, it sits uncomfortably in comparison with a British electorate who had three doses of ‘experience’ before buying Blair another shot; further, the more than half of the US who did not vote for Bush express a visceral dismay at the electoral consequence with a passion that far outweighs the languid, late-night punditry of the more than half who did not vote for Blair. The price of democracy, they queue to tell you here, is how often it sucks.

That these people, by the tens of millions, should be damned with the same contempt deservedly dished to fundamentalist fools (cheering local bumper sticker: ‘The Christian right is neither’) is not fair; nor does it serve either their or our better interests. For here in flyover America, far from the hotspots better known to foreigners - Noo York, Washington, La-la - is where, and how, most Americans live. And for all that much of it is indeed as corny as Kansas in August, a great deal more is attractive and, frankly, ripe for the copying.

The social mobility yearned for by, say, Alan Johnson thrives here. Not one of our wealthier friends was born that way and both cause and result of this is a genuine, albeit incomplete erosion of what the British think of as class. The southern oil billionaire’s accent is the same as his pool-boy’s; when I watched an eminent attorney in court, he asked: ‘Woz y’all workin’ that day?’ - not because he was thick, inarticulate or patronising his witness, but because they both speak like that.

We share casual suppers with the first from Daddy’s farm to make college and who now holds an engineering doctorate, along with a feisty pizza waitress, a salvage diver, an international bestselling novelist, a lesbian runaway from the Moonies, the local fire lieutenant and a flight attendant who has an MA, Eng lit, but chose her job because she likes to get out more: regrettably, an inconceivable grouping in north London.

The lust for wealth that we love to mock is admittedly real and, if achieved, enjoyed. But by the same token, an appreciation of money ensures that nurses, teachers and firefighters are - relative to the UK - well-paid. It is also a sine qua non that if you have, you give; charity is endemic, not spasmodically wrung out of you by rock stars on a roll.

If you haven’t money, the insurance companies will stiff you, but your neighbours, by and large, will not. A lawyer friend recently had a client unable to pay her bill so, for an agreed eight weeks, she found a home-cooked Sunday lunch nestling in her front porch. Which might be altogether too Atticus Finch for your taste, but it doesn’t happen in Basingstoke, and you may decide if that is Basingstoke’s loss.

God-bothering is, of course, a pain. But at least it is kept out of state schools so no parental piety - real or otherwise - may snaffle a choicer education from a more deserving child. And speaking of children: we only hear of the one who runs amok in West Virginia; from the other 58 million, we have lessons to learn. Even in deprived, no-go-after-dark downtown, teenage boys stand to look you in the eye, call you ma’am and have no familiarity with the language of the monosyllabic grunt - if only because their mamas, white and black, will have it no other way, not because the government is sponsoring ‘initiatives’ on ‘respect’.

Too Pollyanna a picture? Missed out the killing fields of Detroit? Perhaps. But even if none of the above negates any of the problem issues on your list or mine, it does not mean than the pros of America are less real - or less evident, if you take the time to look - than the cons. Moreover, the perpetual sneering from overseas is having a sadly dispiriting effect on people who have achieved, in many areas, very much more than we have.

They deserve a lot better. We deserve a little humility. The BBC deserves its slap. From the land of the mockingbirds: g’night John-Boy.

I don’t agree with Ron Paul about many things, but we do share the belief that the U.S. is on the wrong path and I respect that he is courageous enough to clearly state his opinions and beliefs. I wish even one Democratic presidential candidate could be as honest. Let’s learn our historic lesson and resist the propaganda that is pointing us towards war with Iran.

Have We Forgotten 2003 Already?Statement on H Con Res 21 by Rep. Ron Paul

This resolution is an exercise in propaganda that serves one purpose: to move us closer to initiating a war against Iran. Citing various controversial statements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, this legislation demands that the United Nations Security Council charge Ahmadinejad with violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Having already initiated a disastrous war against Iraq citing UN resolutions as justification, this resolution is like déja-vu. Have we forgotten 2003 already? Do we really want to go to war again for UN resolutions? That is where this resolution, and the many others we have passed over the last several years on Iran, is leading us. I hope my colleagues understand that a vote for this bill is a vote to move us closer to war with Iran. Clearly, language threatening to wipe a nation or a group of people off the map is to be condemned by all civilized people. And I do condemn any such language. But why does threatening Iran with a pre-emptive nuclear strike, as many here have done, not also deserve the same kind of condemnation?

Does anyone believe that dropping nuclear weapons on Iran will not wipe a people off the map? When it is said that nothing, including a nuclear strike, is off the table on Iran, are those who say it not also threatening genocide? And we wonder why the rest of the world accuses us of behaving hypocritically, of telling the rest of the world “do as we say, not as we do.

A few disturbing stories:

Medical standards in 21 states based on local rule, not national standards

Washington, D.C. ’ Although most patients don’t know it, 21 U.S. states follow some form of an 1880 ruling that says the standard of care physicians must meet by law depends on where the doctor practices, even if, in some cases, it is a small town with only two doctors. That means what is considered malpractice in some states may be considered acceptable practice in others, say researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center and Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

This locality rule can negatively impact both physicians and patients, and should be changed to the national, evidence-based standards of care that the 29 other states and the District of Columbia have now adopted as the basis for malpractice law, the researchers say in the June 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Whereas this rule protected rural physicians in the 1800s who didn’t have access to the kind of medicine available in larger cities, it now works to create uncertainty for physicians, especially those who practice in more than one legal jurisdiction, which can translate to less than adequate patient care, says the studys lead author, Michelle Huckaby Lewis, M.D., J.D., a Greenwall Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University.

We now live in an age where all physicians have the same opportunities to stay current, at least as far as medical education is concerned, so the standards by which physicians should be measured should be the same throughout the country and must not depend on where the physicians practice, she says.

The authors suggest that in states where medical resources are an issue, a “resource-based” national standard of care can be adopted, as some states have done. For example, some advanced screening technologies used in many states may simply not be available in others, so a resource-based standard would take that into account, they say.

This issue hurts patients who may want a cutting edge treatment and physicians who want to practice evidenced-based medicine, and not be limited by what other doctors in their communities are doing, “ says the study’s senior author, Dan Merenstein, M.D., assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center.

Let’s say there is a new drug that has been proven in many studies and has been endorsed by expert groups as the best to treat Parkinson’s disease,” he says. “Well, if I am seeing a patient in Maryland on Monday I should be comfortable using this medicine as this state uses national standards. But if I am treating a patient on Wednesday in Virginia, which uses locality rule, I may need to think twice, especially if I sense that most doctors in Virginia don’t yet use the drug.

“As all drugs have potential adverse events and if something happens, per Virginia law I would not have been following the standard of care,” Merenstein says. “So I may be forced to use a drug that is less beneficial for patients.”

The locality rule is interpreted in different ways by different states, the authors say. In Virginia, for example, all physicians are expected to meet one state-wide standard, which is often unspecified, but in some states, locality rules are based on small regions or townships.

And in some states, the reason the locality rule remains as a legal standard is because it minimizes malpractice liability and so is supported by either physician groups or lawyers who represent physicians, Lewis says. “Medical malpractice attorneys are very aware of these locality rules,” she says.

“This can help physicians because it requires patients who file malpractice suits to find expert witnesses who also are familiar with that local standard of care,” she says. “But I have seen a lot of cases of malpractice thrown out because it is often difficult to find physicians in the same community who will serve as expert witnesses against a fellow doctor.”

“But this has become a double-edged sword for many physicians, because it can inhibit the adaptation of scientific advancement, and means that some doctors who want to practice the best evidence-based medicine are at risk if they do so,” Lewis says.

Death Toll from Hurricane Katrina Rising

The official death tolls in New Orleans stands at about 1,100. State health officials said deaths have not been listed as Katrina-related since the end of 2005, except for bodies found under storm wreckage. But coroner Dr. Frank Minyard said this week he believes the hurricane is still behind many deaths.

The bodies are no longer being dragged from houses and buildings toppled by Hurricane Katrina, but nearly two years later many in the medical community think the storm is still killing.
Storm survivors are dying from the effects of both psychological and physical stress, from the dust and mold still in dwellings to financial problems to fear of crime, health experts and officials say.
“There is no doubt in my mind that Katrina is still killing our residents,” Orleans Parish coroner Dr. Frank Minyard said this week.

“People with pre-existing conditions that are made worse by the stress of living here after the storm. Old people who are just giving up. People who are killing themselves because they feel they can’t go on,” Minyard said.

Some say an in-depth federal analysis is needed, despite a new state report that found no significant increase in deaths in the New Orleans area from January 2006 through June 2006. The state Department of Health and Hospitals is still compiling figures for the last six months of 2006.
Dr. Raoult Ratard, the state epidemiologist, said “the only slight increase” in deaths was in the first three months of 2006 in Orleans Parish.

But New Orleans medical officials say that jump, from 11.3 per 1,000 deaths to 14.3 per 1,000, — a leap of more than 25 percent — was anything but slight. Moreover, the report doesn’t take into account evacuees who died while away from the city and were returned for burial.
“Our death rate was already high, that’s huge,” said Dr. Kevin Stephens Sr., director of the New Orleans Health Department.

In this month’s New Yorker Magazine Seymour M. Hersh details how Major General Antonio Taguba was forced to retire because of his report about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. He tells Hersh that the abuse and torture that went on in that prison was far worse than reported or admitted. He claims, for example, that videos and images that were not made public show a male soldier in his uniform sodomizing a female detainee and says he has detailed information about the sexual humiliation of a father and his son.

I have a deep admiration for Major General Taguba who revealed the truth during his investigation and lost his job because of it. The question is — now what? Will those who knew about these atrocities and hid the truth be punished? Who will pursue the guys at the top (Rumsfeld) who allowed these disgraceful things to happen? Hersh and Taguba have done their jobs well. Where are all the brave men and women who are supposed to be leading our country?

Atrocities such as those that took place in Abu Ghraib transcend poltical affiliations. George Bush once said that he wanted to impose “moral clarity” on the world. Unfortunately, the actions of this administration are as bad as the “evil doers” the president said he wanted to hunt down and kill. Congress must put a stop to it. Let’s see some moral clarity from our representatives: Torture and abuse is wrong and those who allow it to happen should be punished.

A good start would be stripping Tommy Franks, George Tenet and Paul Bremer of their Medals of Freedom and giving them all to Taguba.

The General’s Report
How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.
by Seymour M. Hersh

On the afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to testify the next day, in televised hearings before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week, revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs showing prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually humiliated, had appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.

In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.

If there was a redeeming aspect to the affair, it was in the thoroughness and the passion of the Army’s initial investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he found:

Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees . . . systemic and illegal abuse.

Taguba was met at the door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant. Craddock’s daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba’s two children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, ‘Craddock just said, very coldly, ‘Wait here.’  In a series of interviews early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that the abused detainees were “only Iraqis. Even so, he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in.

Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba “of the Taguba report! Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened? Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture? At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ˜That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.

…I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.) Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee. The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties, Taguba said.

…Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, “Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,”  Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.

…[when called to testify about the allegations] Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge. As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:

January 13th . . . I don’t remember precisely when, but sometime in that period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn’t know, and you didn’t know, and I didn’t know.

“And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are,” Rumsfeld said.

Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him “if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S. “Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.” It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects “We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’ “is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”
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According to administration officials global warming is a myth. Despite this, however, there is growing evidence to support the fact that the planet is changing dramatically and that we, its inhabitants, will ultimately suffer because of these changes. The stories below outline how grain supplies have dropped to their lowest level in at least 50 years. Fisheries are also failing. It is time to act: write to your congressional representative and tell him or her you support the environment and expect him or her to do the same. Save the planet. Save its inhabitants. Go green.

Lowest Food Supplies in 50 to 100 Years

SASKATOON, Sask.-Today, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its first projections of world grain supply and demand for the coming crop year: 2007/08. USDA predicts supplies will plunge to a 53-day equivalent-their lowest level in the 47-year period for which data exists. “The USDA projects global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record. Further, it is likely that, outside of wartime, global grain supplies have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer,” said NFU Director of Research Darrin Qualman.

Most important, 2007/08 will mark the seventh year out of the past eight in which global grain production has fallen short of demand. This consistent shortfall has cut supplies in half-down from a 115-day supply in 1999/00 to the current level of 53 days. “The world is consistently failing to produce as much grain as it uses,” said Qualman. He continued: “The current low supply levels are not the result of a transient weather event or an isolated production problem: low supplies are the result of a persistent drawdown trend.”

In addition to falling grain supplies, global fisheries are faltering.

Reports in respected journals Science and Nature state that 1/3 of ocean fisheries are in collapse, 2/3 will be in collapse by 2025, and our ocean fisheries may be virtually gone by 2048. “Aquatic food systems are collapsing, and terrestrial food systems are under tremendous stress,” said Qualman.

Demand for food is rising rapidly.

There is a worldwide push to proliferate a North American-style meat-based diet based on intensive livestock production-turning feedgrains into meat in this way means exchanging 3 to 7 kilos of grain protein for one kilo of meat protein. Population is
rising-2.5 billion people will join the global population in the coming decades.

For more information:

Backgrounder to the NFU’s May 11, 2007 News Release

The United States Department of Agriculture reports recent grain supply anddemand numbers on its World Agriculture Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE)

http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu

Once again, one must wonder just how much safer we are with all these new “terror fighting” tools.

FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data

…But two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents’ requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have, according to the audit results provided to The Washington Post. Only two such examples were identified earlier in the smaller sample.

FBI officials said the results confirmed what agency supervisors and outside critics feared, namely that many agents did not understand or follow the required legal procedures and paperwork requirements when collecting personal information with one of the most sensitive and powerful intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era — the National Security Letter, or NSL.

FBI Terror Watch List ‘Out of Control’
A terrorist watch list compiled by the FBI has apparently swelled to include more than half a million names.

Privacy and civil liberties advocates say the list is growing uncontrollably, threatening its usefulness in the war on terror.

The bureau says the number of names on its terrorist watch list is classified.

A portion of the FBI’s unclassified 2008 budget request posted to the Department of Justice Web site, however, refers to “the entire watch list of 509,000 names,” which is utilized by its Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force.